The Neolithic deity to whom human sacrifices
were offered was almost invariably female, the vestigial remnants of which
tradition account for the veiled associations of Pasiphaë and Ariadne
with the tribute of Athenian maidens and youths ostensibly sacrificed to
the Minotaur. The historical question of woman's position in Minoan society
has often been raised because of the famous bare-breasted snake goddess
figurines, or on the evidence of frescoes from the late Palatial Period
showing female figures participating in such rituals as "bull- leaping."
This general issue has been addressed by Margaret Ehrenberg in her superbly
intelligent study, Women in Prehistory:

Whatever conclusions about the position of Minoan
women, even high-status women, can be drawn from the frescoes, it seems
highly dubious that they can be backed up by the architectural evidence
of the palaces themselves....So, what can we say positively about the position
of women in Minoan society? Can any inferences about the kinship pattern,
whether it was matrilineal or patrilineal, be drawn? Does the evidence
[which she describes] indicate that Minoan Crete might have been a matriarchal
society, as has been suggested both by some of the earliest scholars and
by recent feminists? ...[A]s regards matriarchy...I have also tried to
show not only how little evidence there is in any living or documented
society, but also how difficult it would be to prove from archaeological
data. Even if we may hypothesize that women, or at least women of higher
status, may have had a better deal in Minoan Crete than in many other later
societies, it is impossible to argue that they actually held power. Equally,
however, as in most other prehistoric societies, there is no evidence that
men held power at the expense of women.

[Ehrenberg, Women in Prehistory, p. 117
f.]

If the institution of kingship arrived
in Crete around 2000 BCE--and as it, together with a system of war-lords,
is attested in the later Linear B records--we should not expect to find
much evidence of a matriarchy in the sense of RULE by women. The religious
acclaim paid to female goddesses, however, may be quite another issue. Such
a dislocation of power characterizes both medieval Mariology and classical
Greek society (a thousand years after Knossos) when Olympus enjoyed some
degree of gender parity, but not so the agora and polis.

This question of lineages leads us back
to one of the most famous images created by Marcel Duchamp, his painting
Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). One aspect of Duchamp's iconography
that many at the time found disturbing was his irreverent depiction of the
ideal nude from a nineteenth-century tradition of fine art and high culture
coming DOWN from the pedestal. Women were, in fact, doing just this--coming
down from the pedestal of patronizing indulgence and social hypocrisy--in
order to take their place in the real world: with the campaigns for women's
suffrage, the loosening of divorce procedures, sexual liberation, and the
on-going disputes concerning equality in the workplace and freedom of choice
with respect to bearing children. An elusive historical question remains,
however, about WHEN Woman--whether the "Venus" of Laussel, the
Virgin of Chartres, or Duchamp's Nude--first found herself on a pedestal
to begin with. That could have occurred (so some may reason) when woman
ceased to have real power in social institutions, which in Crete must have
been (if ever) at least prior to 2000 BCE. The much later Greek myth of
Europa's abduction and rape may reflect the turn of events on Crete with
the arrival of Min/Minos and kingship, or the story may be an attempt to
symbolize later Greek invasions. Then again, the extant version of the myth
may not necessarily document these events, but instead represent an inverted
reading of still earlier circumstances.

The original arrival of Europa on the island
might well have been by her own command, for the way in which she is described
as grasping the divine bull's right horn is profoundly reminiscent of the
famous Perigordian bas-relief (from around 20,000 BCE), carved in the limestone
of an overhanging rock shelter at Laussel, in the Dordogne region of southern
France, featuring a bountiful naked woman marked with red ochre, holding
a bull's (or bison's) horn in her right hand. As pointed out by Alexander
Marshack, this horn is incised with thirteen clearly engraved vertical strokes--a
number that most of the world's subsequent mythologies relate to the number
of crescent moons ("horns") in a lunar year, as well as to the
thirteen days from the appearance of the first crescent to the full moon.
There in the caves, of course, she would have been recognized as the "Mistress
of the Animals," the Paleolithic Goddess of the Hunt whose representions
in ivory and stone dating from thousands of years before the invention of
grain agriculture have been found all along the migration trail of the great
wooly mammoth from the Atlantic Ocean to the plains of Russia.

[See, Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization,
pp. 333 ff.]

The carefully time-factored star chart
of the ancient calendrical round may have been established, as some have
theorized, around 6500 BCE. At that time the unmistakable, large scale celestial
phenomenon of Gemini at the vernal equinox marked a sort of "time-zero"
as one of the two possible times when the ecliptic would intersect the Milky
Way; the other time would have been around 20,000 BCE when Saggitarius and
the opposite side of the Milky Way were in a comparable position. Or again,
the clear understanding of these vast processes may only have appeared somewhat
later, together with formalization of the zodiac, say, around 4000 BCE.
Then, the whole system could have been rationalized and read either backward
or forward in time. Yet, even with the implied enormous, intervening spans
of time, there is a great temptation to see in the prehistoric Laussel figure
the same pre-Hellenic Moon-goddess of both Minoan and Mycenaean art,

riding triumphantly on the Sun-bull, her victim;
the scene survives in eight moulded plaques of blue glass, found in the
Mycenaean city of Midea. This seems to have been part of the fertility
ritual [referred to by Athenaeas] during which Europa's May-garland was
carried in procession.

[Graves, The Greek Myths, 58.3 (Volume
I, p. 197).]

If there were sacrificed to the Moon-goddess
males identified with the daily dying and reborn Sun, she may have thus
transferred her dominion from the animal kingdom (as the archaic Goddess
of the Hunt) to that of the vegetable. In this process some of her celestial
symbolism shifted from the moon to the stars: the constellation Virgo came
to represent the Celestial Mother and Daughter, the female deities known
in classical Greece as Demeter--who also assumed the form of a Mare goddess--and
Kore (or Persephone), the pair we equate more or less with Pasipha and Ariadne.
Having once discovered the principle of the zodiac and the precession, it
would have been an easy matter to assign appropriate significance to particular
asterisms. The alpha lucida, the brightest star in the constellation
Virgo, is called Spica, which means the ear of grain; it would have been
in position behind the rising sun at the vernal equinox around 12,500 BCE--near
the beginning of the last great Pleistocene Age ice melt, and reasonably
contemporary with the energetic spread outward from the Fertile Crescent
of early Neolithic livestock and grain domestication.

[For a survey of the topic and many illustrations
see, Adele Getty, Goddess: Mother of Living Nature, Thames and Hudson,
London (1990).]

HORSES

One of the curiosities of Paleolithic cave
art is the frequency with which the horse is represented. Purported explanations
of the magnificent animal paintings from southern France and northern Spain
as some mere form of hunting magic fail to account for the disparity between
the numbers of animals of any one species in the paintings in comparison
with the bones of that animal that suggest meal scraps. Reindeer and red
deer apparently comprised such a large a portion of the diet that they may
have been among the earliest of domesticated species; yet their images in
Paleolithic art are rare. On the other hand, the horse is frequently shown
in cave paintings, and is represented by other evidence, but there is scant
evidence they were eaten.

It is certain that the horse was of tremendous
cultural importance to the people in Western Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic--horse
teeth and bones have been found carefully placed in Magdalenian hearths
in a number of deep Pyrenean caves such as Labastide and Erberua, as well
as near the hearths at the Magdalenian open-air camp of Princevent near
Paris (despite the fact that reindeer account for almost 100% of this site's
faunal remains). At Duruthy (Landes), the carved horses were found in a
kind of "horse sanctuary" dated to the twelfth millennium BC;
the biggest, a kneeling sandstone figure, rested against two horse skulls
and on fragments of horse jaw, while three horse-head pendants were in
the immediate vicinity. Finally, it should be noted that the horse may
very well have been under close control during the Upper Palaeolithic,
as suggested by a variety of evidence including some possible depictions
of simple harnesses on certain figures, especially one from La Marche.

The horse has particular relevance for
us, not only because of the importance of cordage for its domestication,
nor even for its other associations with the figure of Odin (or, Wotan)
in Germanic mythology such as the invention of writing with runes. One of
the most significant antique representations of the Cretan Labyrinth shows
the design, as it were, being pulled along by a horse. An Etruscan wine
jar from the late seventh-century BCE called the Tragliatella vase shows
two horses with armed and mounted riders. The first displays a partridge
device on his shield and has a strange figure (perhaps Aeneas's aged father
Anchises) riding tandem. The rider of the second horse (possibly the hero's
son) has a similar round shield with the emblem of a duck, carries a spear,
and--as if attached to the horse's tail--pulls a rounded-form of the Labyrinth.
Engraved, retrograde, in one of the outer paths of the two- dimensional
Labyrinth are the letters TRUIA, marking it as a plan of the city of ancient
Troy.

In The White Goddess, Robert Graves
associates the maze pattern with the "Spiral Castle" of Arianrhod,
also Ariadne's constellation the Corona Borealis, or what in the British
Isles is called "Troy Town," where the sacred Solar hero or Sun-king
goes, and sometimes returns, after his sacrificial demise. The scene on
the Tragliatella vase he thinks represents, not the flight of Aeneas from
Troy, but the escape of a potential victim (Theseus) who was doomed, like
the partridge in the brushwood maze and, for that matter, the bull on the
Hagia Triada sarcophagus or the remains of the bound priest at Archanes,
to die.

A Moon-priestess has come to meet him: a terrible
robed figure with one arm menacingly akimbo, as she offers an apple, his
passport to Paradise....Yet a diminutive female figure, robed like the
priestess, guides the king--if the hero is Theseus, we may call her Ariadne
[and the priestess would be Pasipha]--who has helped him to escape from
the maze. And he boldly displays a counter-charm--namely an Easter-egg,
the egg of resurrection. Easter was the season when Troy Town dances were
performed on the turf-cut mazes of Britain; and of Etruria, too, where
the famous Lars Porsena of Clusium built a labyrinth for his own tomb.
(Similar labyrinth tombs existed in pre-Hellenic Greece: near Nauplia,
on Samos, and on Lemnos.) An Etruscan egg of polished black trachite, found
at Perugia, with an arrow in relief running around it, is the same holy
egg. Against the spearmen on the vase [apparently pursuing the "Theseus"
figure] is written MAIM; against the king, EKRAUN; against the priestess,
MITHES. LUEI. If, as seems probable, these words are Western Greek, they
mean, respectively: "Winter," "He Reigned," and "Having
pronounced, she sets free." [Or: He reigned, having pronounced "She
sets free Winter."] The letters written against Ariadne are indecipherable.

[Graves, The White Goddess, p. 330.]

The words may refer to the winter months
when Dionysus was the ruling deity of the temple and the Oracle at Delphi,
with its omphalos, while Apollo was away among the Hyperboreans in
the Land beyond the North Wind, "the quarter from which the sun never
shines." This has been identified with Caer Sidi, or Caer-droia in
Wales, the Spiral Castle, and so forth, which is to say metaphorically,
the Land of the Dead, astronomically tokened by the Corona Borealis, or--at
a more sophisticated level of understanding--the point in the sky located
in the loop of the constellation Draco (there are no bright stars just there)
marking the pole of the ecliptic, and hence the key to the phenomenon of
the precession of the equinox around which it wobbles in a great 25,920-year
nutational cycle.

[See Graves, The White Goddess, p. 111
f.]

Robert Graves (as a modern approximation
of the bardic poet) does not, however, make associations with the precession
in The White Goddess, extraordinary as that book may be. He composed
the text in 1946, in the space of a few weeks, working with no notes, in--he
says --an "analeptic trance." On the other hand, Hertha von Dechend
(who had written about Justus von Liebig) and Giorgio de Santillana (an
historian of science), in their differently remarkable book Hamlet's
Mill, first published twenty-three years later (1969), so far as we
have been able to determine, make scant mention of the Labyrinth save for
a footnote on stone labyrinths in Finland (p. 30), and none--although we
might have missed something--of the Spiral Castle, Graves, or The White
Goddess. Nevertheless, on the back of David R. Godine's paperbound edition
of Hamlet's Mill (1977)-- which says something about books and their
covers--appears this unintentionally ironic blurb:

"This courageous enterprise," says the
Atlantic Monthly, "has produced a provocative book. It is likely
to remain, like Robert Graves's White Goddess, a lion in everybody's
path for years."

[The citation is attributed to the Washington
Post Book World.]

Other arguments, however, do seem to provide
indirect support for making connections in this grand tapestry of themes,
many important strands of which have been introduced by those two texts.
For example, there is the problem of identifying place names suggesting
possible origins for the name "Dionysus." There is a series of
startling parallels between Dionysus, Cuchulain and, in the great medieval
Finnish epic the Kalevala--orally transmitted and unchanged since
the earliest, pre-Christian times--the avenging twin Kullervo, who gets
sent away to the house of the divine smith Ilmarinen to serve as a cowherd.
One of the stories about the Celtic hero Cuchulain, his sword and a magic
apple, also provides clues about the forelock, matrilinear succession, and
other repressive exploits of King Minos:

A Greek version of the same story is referred
to Minoan times: Nissus King of Nisa--an ancient city near Megara destroyed
by the Dorians--had his "purple" lock plucked by his daughter
Scylla who wished to kill him and marry Minos of Crete. The Greeks have
given this story an unlikely moral ending, that Minos drowned Scylla as
a parricide from the stern of his galley; at any rate, the genealogy of
the Kings of Nisa makes it plain that the throne went by matrilineal succession.

[Graves, The White Goddess, p. 316.]

The Latin poet Virgil (70-19 BCE) provides
for our Tragliatella vase another reading in the Aeneid, the epic
deliberately modeled on the Iliad and the Odyssey and composed
for Octavian (later to become the Emperor Augustus) in order to recount
the wanderings of Aeneas after the fall of Troy, leading eventually to the
origins of Rome. The Labyrinth seen by Aeneas was very likely not that particular
Etruscan oinochoe, although it--or one very much like it--may indeed
have been seen by the poet. The Labyrinth still appears, engraved on the
rock by the entrance to the oracular Sibyl's cave at Cumae, where both Aeneas
(and Daedalus before him) made landfall on the Italian peninsula. This was
also the site of a golden-roofed temple to Apollo, on the cliffs above the
Sibyl's grotto (said to have been built by Daedalus with the help of earth
spirits) and close to Lake Avernus with its volcanic venting of mephitic
gasses that represented for both Aeneas and Dante the Entrance to the Underworld,
and for Rodin, the Gates of Hell.

Aeneas, who escaped from the city carrying his
father on his shoulders, led forth also his little son Iulus. It is this
boy whom, in the fifth book of the poem, Virgil pictures as taking part
with his companions in a sport called the Ludus Trojae or Lusus
Trajae (Game of Troy), sometimes simply Troja. According to
the Roman tradition it was introduced into Italy by Aeneas, and his son
Ascanius imparted it to the Alban kings and through them to the Romans.
The game consisted of a sort of processional parade or dance, in which
some of the participants appear to have been mounted on horseback. Virgil
draws a comparison between the complicated movements of the game and the
convolutions of the Cretan Labyrinth:

Ut quondam Creta fertur Labyrinthus in alta

parietibus textum caecis iter ancipitemque

mille viis habuisse dolum, qua signa sequendi

frangeret indeprensus et irremeabilis error.

They say that once upon a time the Labyrinth in
mountainous Crete contained a path, twining between walls which barred
the view, with a treacherous plan uncertainty in its thousand ways, so
that its baffling plan, which none might master and none retrace, would
foil the trace of any guiding clues.

The game is also mentioned as a well-established
institution by other Roman writers of a century or so later, such as Suetonius
and Tacitus, and appears to have assumed imposing dimensions at one time,
as we see from a representation of it on the reverse of a medal of Nero,
where it has more of the nature of a military review. It was generally
performed by youths, and only those of good social standing took part.

[Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths, p. 158.
In place of the translation by Trapp offered by Matthews for Book Five,
lines 585-591, we have substituted the prose rendition by W. F. Jackson
Knight in the Penguin Books edition (1956); he also wrote on the Labyrinth,
and on Virgil.]

Intriguingly, Virgil also compares the
motions of horse and rider to the swimming of playful dolphins. The whole
was a carefully staged event, one of the central rituals of the funeral
games (the reason for them being held at Cumae, by the Entrance to Hades)
intended to honor Anchises, the father of Aeneas. It is the locus classicus
for all fancy horsemanship performed by sheriff's posses and mounted drill
teams in today's holiday parades. According to the popular festival calendar
still generally observed in the United States of America, holidays with
parades are celebrated typically on the "cross-quarter days."
These relate to the solstices and the equinoxes--as the primary quadrature
of the solar year--and to the days falling halfway between them: as if an
eight-pointed star were to be superimposed on the annual circuit of (the
earth around) the sun.

Ground-hog day, celebrated on Feb. 2, marks
the half way point between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. At
the vernal equinox, naturally, we have the Easter Parade. Then on May Day,
dancing around the May-pole used to be a major celebration in the British
Isles until the advent of Oliver Cromwell and the deliberate destruction
of megalithic monuments and a sense of respect for the "pagan"
past or anything at all smacking of public sexuality. Mexico has Cinco
de Mayo by political fiat, but in the United States the holiday has
shifted to Memorial Day when, in addition to remembering its dead, America
worships speed and the automobile at the Indianapolis 500. Between
the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox traditional Europeans used
to celebrate Lammas, a festival of the early harvest, which falls around
August 2nd. The autumnal equinox appears to have been slighted also, but
the holiday of Lammas has probably been replaced by Independence Day, the
Fourth of July, which now does duty as the big parade day of high summer.
The remaining cross-quarter day is of course Halloween, or Samhain (Christianized
as the Eve of All Saints Day), when the old Celtic year began. It is celebrated,
as every schoolchild knows, with a Halloween parade. Now, parades for the
winter solstice are held ten days later on New Year's Day, to accompany
momentous collegiate football bowl contests.

The riding skills needed for a performance
such as that described by Virgil, while having obvious military applications,
were so highly-refined they may also be seen as precedents for modern equestrian
competition. This is especially true for dressage in which subtle and accomplished
horsemanship must be demonstrated, requiring--above all--a sensitive level
of inter-species communication between horse and rider. As a mark of continuity
with the ancient insistence upon the "high-born" heritage or "noble"
bearing of the performers, the custom persists among real horse-people today
that, should the rider become unseated, the horse is never to be blamed;
rather--as befitting clarity about whose consciousness was distracted or
whose control was lost--if anything at all needs to be said, it must be
"I took a fall," or simply, "I fell." Hence, imagine
the embarrassment and chagrin among true horse fanciers when former President
Ronald Reagan, in a widely-reported incident, was quoted saying "The
horse threw me." Modern Olympic equestrian competition is also unusual
in that the horse is recognized (traditionally, anyway, by the participants)
as the true athlete, which not only helps to atone for arrogance on the
part of species supremacists, but also allows head-to-head competition on
objectively even ground between genders, both horse and human.

THE TRITON
SHELL

Daedalus and Minos finally met up again,
in a sort of dénoument of the Labyrinth myth; it was years later,
and the scene was set in Sicily. The story goes that Minos, with vengeance
in his heart, pursued the "clever artificer" who flew away with
his son Icarus on beeswax wings. In order to lure and trap Daedalus, he
devised a scheme by which to entice the craftsman--publicly offering a prize
to anyone able to solve the problem of stringing a triton shell--believing
that only the wit and ingenuity of Daedalus could succeed. Here again appear
the motifs of the decoy (as with the brushwood maze used to trap the pesach
partridges, or the bull-baiting shown on the gorgeous golden Vapheio cups),
and the thread idea of the two-and three-dimensional Labyrinth, now at another
order of three-and four-dimensional complexity. Daedalus did discover a
solution by affixing a gossamer filament to the back of an ant who then
crawled through the small hole bored in the end of the triton shell toward
some honey placed at the larger opening. To the end of the filament Daedalus
simply attached a sturdier string (some say it was of linen, but it could
have been hemp) and pulled it through. So, here we have a further instance
of luring, plus honey from the iconographical frame of reference of Pasipha,
the Queen Bee. Since both ant and bee are members of Hymenoptera,
it is also worth recalling that the empirical method of handling a swarm
of bees is to lure them with a queen.

We may recall as well that the Cretan Labyrinth,
on the X/Y plane, was designed by Daedalus from the Tower, on the Z axis--from
which vantage point, of course, the whole plan of any labyrinth becomes
clear and susceptible, as a riddle in space, to solution. The name of the
triton shell comes from its association with one of the offspring of Amphitrite
and Poseidon: the Triton who was, in patriarchal times a male river-god
of Boeotia. Earlier, Triton was one of three goddess-nymphs of Lake Tritonis
in Libya (which, in antiquity, meant anywhere west of the Nile River) who
nurtured the goddess Athena at her birth. The three were also known as the
Graeae and provided her with the magical goat-skin bag (as carried by the
Essence, or "Fool" card of the Tarot) upon which the aegis,
or the head of the Gorgon, was emblazoned and said to contain a serpent
within. Later this was captured by Perseus, and taken by him (together with
an oracular tooth and magic eye) around the Eastern Mediterranean (via Phoenecia)
to Mycenae ("the place of mushrooms"), where he produced the letters
of the alphabet, perhaps as serpent's teeth, somewhat like those which sprouted
into "warriors" when sown by the Theban Greek alphabetic hero
Cadmus.

Tritone means
"the third queen": that is, the eldest member of the triad--mother
of the maiden who fought Pallas and of the nymph into which she grew--just
as Core-Persephone was Demeter's daughter....Pottery finds suggest a Libyan
immigration into Crete as early as 4000 BCE; and a large number of goddess-worshipping
Libyan refugees from the Western Delta seem to have arrived there when
Upper and Lower Egypt were forcibly united under the First Dynasty about
the year 3000 BCE [or, some 300 years earlier].

[Graves, The Greek Myths, Section 8, "The
Birth of Athene."]

The gossamer thread detail is a subtle
touch: let the ant do the job in principle, as it were--with the most delicate
application of abstract principle to concrete reality--then one can attach
and pull through the string too heavy for the ant. Clearly this is a lesson
about working toward preliminary solutions of problems with available means.
Here also is a nice extrapolation of the Labyrinth problem to a different,
smaller scale, and with a new order of complexity. Still, we might ask if
this episode sheds any light on the genealogical theme that recurs in these
legends about King Minos.

As we have observed once before, matter
most naturally moves through space in a spiral of time. Even in that which
appears to be circular--such as the (apparent) annual cycle of the sun--when
the circle closes upon itself, that spot is at some new place in time: for
the sun itself has moved, and not only mutually with respect to its nearest
companions, but they also rotate aournd the galactic center once in about
200 million years. Our Milky Way is one of thirty or so galaxies in the
Local Group, which are held together by gravity and describe complex rotational
patterns about one another. These, in turn, are part of the Virgo Cluster,
about 50 million light years away and known as the Local Supercluster, composed
of some 200 million bright galaxies and many galactic glusters, dominating
our region of space. And so go the cycles, the orbits and gyres, in every
direction --in the memorable words of the popular astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan--for
"billyuns and billyuns" of light years out to enigmatic radio
galaxies and quasars which, if the implications of red-shift theory are
to be believed, have each qualified their mutual relations by receding at
a speed near that of light, one from another, and they all from us.

[An illuminating--if highly simplified--graphic
representation of these relationships can be appreciated in the double-page
spread, "The Universe: Nature's Grandest Design," in the National
Geographic Atlas of the World, Sixth edition, National Geographic Society,
Washington, DC, (1990), p. 119.]

To sub-atomic physicists, neurologists,
biologists, ecologists, astronomers and cosmologists alike, this is a commonplace:
no matter how it may appear to the simple-minded, every apparent circle
is a helix. It is no mere accident that the structure of DNA is a double
helix. Perhaps, if we think of the heritage of Minos as the string, the
lesson related to the Triton shell--an archetypally female form, and associated
with a mythological figure, who as we note, was originally female--is about
matriliny. On ancient Crete, for all its kings and warlords, this rule by
men (or, patriarchal line) was possibly transmitted by old, but still deeply
respected matrilineal institutions, as tokened by the emblematically female
Triton shell.

THE ESSENTIAL
ELEMENT

In every society there is the essential
element of the Woman, which may be manifested either as the warp or as the
weft in mapping the social structure so that it can be understood historically.
When we say, so easily, that the "power" or "rulership"
passes through either patriliny or matriliny, it must always be qualified
in meaning; for, human relationships, however neatly programmed or designed,
are ever compromised by sophisticated complexities of both the psyche and
the "accidents" of real life: how things happen to fall out anyway.

In medieval Tibet, the great sage (and
later become saint) Milarepa, whose Hundred Throusand Songs were
among Constantin Brancusi's favorite reading material (the book was always
by his bedside in the Paris studio), early in his shamanic career, as a
Great Sorcerer, practiced black magic at the urging of his mother with the
intent of furthering her real estate interests. Until the genocidal invasion
of the Chinese in 1959 and their subsequent desecration of one of the world's
historically, artistically, and spiritually richest cultures, much of the
real power in Tibet was, in fact, controlled by women--which involved even
the widepread practice of polyandry. But it would be hard to discern this
without direct experience, deep reading, or explicit communication with
expatriate Tibetans, because the most pronounced and obvious emphasis is
on male activities, especially in the monastic traditions of Tibetan Buddhism.
Nevertheless, the Vajrayana necessarily depicts the Mahamudra (the
"Grand Gesture") in a graphic representation of its central message,
as the yab/yum, a yogic coupling of male and female forms as emblematic
of cosmic principles, symbolzing the unity of Wisdom and Compassion.

In the cultural traditions of the Christian
West--and also of the Islamic Middle East--the figure of archetypal Woman
has found it ncessary to practice subterfuge. For while the female form
has been represented--often as not on a pedestal--the true nature of her
power and majesty as Mother of All has been the official Secret, the under-ground
transmission of which has been at the core of esoteric teaching and practice.
From time to time, now in this place now in another, it has burst forth
into the light to grace the everyday world; those occasions are invariably
regarded as periods of high culture--renascences, always of some Golden
Age--with blossoming of the sciences, the visual arts, poetry, architecture,
music. Such were the times at Baghdad in the court of Haroun ar-Rashid,
when great Sufi saints might be honored as advisors of state, or in Province
of the troubadors when the institution of courtly love gave passionate expression
to those ideals the West has honored ever since as "chivalry,"
the roots of which (through cheval, French for "horse")
go back through Aeneas and the Etruscans, through various labyrinthine wanderings,
some via Crete to Troy, and ultimately back to the caves.

Among the oldest surviving examples of
the Labyrinth theme in a Christian context is a pavement maze about eight
feet square in the basilica of Reparatus at Orlansville, Algeria. Matthews
has noted the resemblance of this work "to the Roman pavement found
at Harham and the tomb-mosaic at Susa." The ("non-Cretan")
form is composed along two axes of symmetry, and contains in its center
a word-game, or jeu-des-lettres, recalling Duchamp's game painted
on the plaques of With Hidden Noise; in the square of letters in
the Orlansville example, reading outward from the center any direction except
diagonally, one spells out the words SANTA ECLESIA, "Holy Church."
The sixth-century church of San Vitale in Ravenna, constructed by the Emperor
Justinian, also has a large circular maze set in the pavement in front of
the choir with its glorious mosaics. There a dark band appears to lead from
the center outward because it is punctuated with a sequence of white stone
triangles quite like arrowheads indicating directionality. There may have
been a total of 384 such marble markers, among which every sixth one is
set in a square of distinctly darker color, probably to aid the penitent
in the repetition of Aves or prayers.

[Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths, p. 54
f.]

The medieval cathedrals of Lucca and Cremona,
and Italian churches from the same period in Pavia and Piacenza, featured
mazes with representations depicting Theseus, the Minotaur, and--in the
church of San Michele at Pavia--signs of the zodiac and other con-stellations,
including "Equs" and "Draco." An example in the church
of Santa Maria-in-Aquiro in Rome, later than Ravenna by only a few hundred
years, was composed of porphyry (purple marble) alternating with bands of
yellow and green marble around a porphyry center. Decorative diamonds or
lozenges in multi-colored marble also mark the path in a unique circular
pavement maze probably constructed around 1190 in the church of Santa Maria-de-Trastevere
in Rome which, at its center, may have intended to illustate the "five
crossings" of Eternity.

It is now somewhat mutilated, but was originally
a most beautiful example. The fact that the inner paths consist of a series
of concentric rings rather suggests that it has at some time been repaired
without regard to the original design; unless we accept the hypothesis
of M. Durand that they bore a symbolic reference to the various degrees
of beatitude by which the soul approaches heaven, as figured by Dante.

[Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths, p. 58.
Matthews illustrates diagrams for most of these mazes in addition to many
turf mazes, and so forth.]

The whole inspiration of that amazing flowering
of ancient Gaulish/Celtic traditions known as the French High Gothic--with
virtually all of its sublime stained glass, elegant manuscripts, exquisite
sculpture, audacious masonry, mystically innovative technology, bold theology
and brilliant logic, appearing within a couple of generations and within
a hundred miles of Paris--was attributed to, and dedicated to Notre Dame.
Set into the stone pavements of those cathedrals, usually in front of the
choir area, and so easily accessible to pilgrims and members of the congregation,
there was often a labyrinth design, following the custom inherited from
the building of Early Christian and medieval Italian churches.

These pavements bore various names following
medieval custom, such as Chemin de Jrusalem; also, sometimes they
would be known as daedale, or meandre. They were usually symmetrical,
elaborate mazes that did not, however, retain the classical Cretan form.
The center might be known as ciel, or Jérusalem, and
sometimes (as at Rheims, Chartres and Amiens) would feature a figure said
to represent the architect. Approaching the high altar, the pilgrim might
follow the path of the labyrinth design, as if to recapitulate the path
of the archetypal pilgrimage; if penitential, the traversing might be done
on the knees, so as to put the symbolic (or, believed real) sources of the
"life stuff" directly into contact with consecrated ground.

[See, Onians, Chapter IV "The Knees,"
The Origins of European Thought, pp. 174 ff The Greek gonu,
Latin genu, Irish glun are probably all cognate with the
term for "generation," and as well with "genuflection"
and "gonads." See also, Matthews, Chapter IX, "Church Labyrinths,"
Mazes and Labyrinths, pp. 54 ff.]

At Chartres, the high altar has been moved
on several occasions in modern times; the original locus and true center
of the cathedral--which will have been directly atop the sacred mound of
the archaic, pre-Christian Celtic shrine--was between the first and the
second bays of the choir, the spot marked by the crossing of the false transepts
of Fulbert's earlier Romanesque church. Before the high altar was moved
in the sixteenth century, this precise spot

was surmounted at that time by a spire in carved
wood, higher than the spire at the crossing of the transepts, in which
were some little bells of the kind known as "babblers." The spire
disappeared in the fire of 1836 which made havoc of the roof without however
doing any damage to the vault....Recently the altar has again been moved
to the crossing of the transepts; that is to say, in front of the area
where the old rood-screen shut off the mystical part of the church. Ignorance
is always with us.

The centre, where the altar ought to stand,
is in the middle of the second bay of the choir. This bay is still indicated,
to the south-east, by the window of Notre-Dame-de-la- Belle-Verrire, and
to the north-west by the chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Pillier. Besides, this
bay, centre and origin of the whole, is framed, in the aisles, by round
pillars, bare, without colonnettes; two on one side, two on the other,
the only ones of this kind in the aisles. It is easily seen that the necessary
pointers are not wanting. It is round this centre that a cathedral was
built.

[Louis Charpentier, The Mysteries of Chartres
Cathedral, translated by Ronald Fraser with Jannette Jackson, Research
Into Lost Knowledge Organisation, London (1972), p. 84.]

SAINT ANNE

Fifteen hundred years after the conventional
reckoning of the birth of Christ, Leonardo da Vinci--then nearly fifty years
old himself--had just finished painting the Last Supper, and was
at the height of his fame. After the fall of his wise and inspired patron
Lodovico Sforza in Milan, Leonardo returned to Florence, which city had
expelled the Medici in 1494, and resisted political pressure by the French--but
at the price of fanning a psycho-social conflagration initiated by the iconoclastic
fanatic Girolomo Savanarola. This maniacal fundamentalist, only a few years
earlier, had shamed Sandro Botticelli into giving up painting forever, inducing
the artist--in a fit of puritanical fervor--to throw on a huge bonfire most
of his own works as tokens of vanity. Although Botticelli never did paint
again, it was not long before the Florentines burnt Savanarola himself at
the stake, allowing to flower again, in that city of flowers, the great
garden of delight we know today as the High Renaissance. Leonardo--while
still in Milan--painted the Madonna of the Rocks, based on the theme
of the Immaculate Conception, attempting to reveal thereby the mystery of
space itself; now he pursued this idea in a new painting. Giorgio Vasari,
the early art historian, described the occasion:

At last he finished a cartoon [different from
that in London?], in which the Madonna, St. Anne and the Christ Child were
so beautifully portrayed that not only artists, but the townspeople as
well were overcome with admiration. For two days one could witness the
spectacle of men and women, young and old, making a pilgrimage to the room,
as though it were a magnificent festival. Leonardo's masterpiece astonished
the entire population.

The theme concerns the miraculous, matrilineal
transmission of Divine Grace. One important element of Marian veneration
as taught by the Roman Catholic Church holds that--in order to be a proper
vessel for the Incarnation of Christ, she was HERSELF conceived and born
without taint of original sin. This belief, necessarily reflecting on the
relationship with her mother--the issue of spiritual matriliny--was only
formally proclaimed as dogma in a Papal Bull by Pius IX in 1854, thereby
invoking a limit on the logic of infinite regression. However, there was
a long history of the Virgin Mary's cultic importance and, although the
facts of her life are unmentioned in Scripture, by tradition she was announced
miraculously to St. Joachim and St. Anne and presented and dedicated at
the Temple as a virgin. Neither is St. Anne mentioned in Scripture, but
her cult is also said to be very old; the general idea of parthenogenesis,
or virgin birth, of course includes the myth of the birth of Athena, and
the legends of partridges in a brushwood maze, with hidden noise. But it
was neither mythical nor doctrinal issues that fascinated the Florentines.

Such an enthusiastic ovation in Florence, the
artistic center of Italy where the most famous painters competed with one
another, could have been accorded only to a performance that was consider-ed
extraordinary. And, in fact, the St. Anne marks a turning-point
in Italian painting as regards both form and content; iconographically,
it is a genuinely new creation, and as regards the form of this group-composition
it is a new representation of this difficult theme....In the cartoon [in
the Royal Academy of Arts, London] the principles of Classic Art are fulfilled;
the monumental figure style, the harmonious balance between motion and
repose, and the inner and outward unity of the composition... the group
gives an impression of monumentality because of its massive strength, its
sculptural clarity, and the ideal simpli-city and pure beauty of its figures....[In
the painting] the dynamic intensity of the composition...was the exciting
novelty that impressed the Florentine audience....the group built up in
an entirely new way, three-dimensional, plastic and spatial, by the skillful
change of aspect of the two female figures, which are balanced one against
the other....Leonardo did not finish the picture in Florence but kept it
beside him for years, taking it with him to Milan in 1507. It was there
that he completed it, adding the landscape, a barren mountain range--a
bit of inanimate cosmos--before whose light and boundless horizon the figure
group stands out in unusual, almost unreal propinquity.

[Heydenreich, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 42
f.]

Comparisons between the earlier cartoon--a
beautiful work in its own right--and the painting have been a source of
great interest to art historians in part because of the pentimenti,
or changes, made by Leonardo in composition and design, hence the meaning,
of the piece. For example, there appears in the cartoon, together with the
figure of John the Baptist, like Jesus a young child, the familiar image
of St. Anne's hand with the extended index finger pointing straight up in
the air, as if to indicate metaphorically the direction of evolving consciousness
in the lineage. It reappears later in Leonardo's John the Baptist
(like this painting, also in the Louvre), but neither the pointing finger
nor the child St. John were included in the St. Anne.In the cartoon
Leonardo had positioned the heads of the mother and daughter side by side,
intending to contrast their expressions and personalities, while in the
painting, there is a marvelous sweeping curve that flows from the head of
St. Anne, following her maternal gaze, down to the head of the Virgin Mary,
and with her tender gesture to that of the Christ Child who is grasping
the right ear of the Sacrificial Lamb. Baby Jesus also has his leg astride
the Lamb's back as if mounting the wee Beast while His Mother gently restrains
Him.

Along the horizon line, parallel with the
head of St. Anne, are now lined up: on the far right a great tree, the vegetable
kingdom; and where in the cartoon, just above the pointing finger some have
seen hints of a lamb's head, there now appears the mineral kingdom, a magnificent
representation of mountainous rocks, to balance the head of St. Anne, the
Great Mother with one arm akimbo, the original vehicle for the Spirit of
Life as embodied in the kingdom of animalia. To the left of St. Anne's head
may be the most mysterious element of all: symmetrically disposed with respect
to the tree on the right is a view into the deep space of a riverine valley
down which flows the Waters of Life, as if from Paradise, and--just as James
Joyce found the emblematically female, eternally nurturing spirit of Anna
Livia Plurabelle in the riverrun waters of dear dirty old Dublin's Liffey--the
same mystical force follows the tender curve of the Virgin Mary's arm, radiating
from her knee, then spinning out an intricate pinwheel of divine energy
from the Christ Child's arm, and the swirl of hands and feet, to the tail
of the Lamb: Agnus Dei, Qui tollis peccata mundi, "O Lamb of
God, Who takest away the sins of the world." With the emergence of
large, densely populated communities--that is, cities--humanity established
on earth its basic pattern of species domination, environmental usurpation,
and ecological conquest, instituting or imposing most of the distinguishing
features we still recognize--with arrogance, disdain, and deeply mistaken
pride--as "civilization." By around 3000 BCE there had appeared
all of the basic elements of city life by which we set ourselves apart from
prehistoric populations, significant among which were institutions of political
rule, organized religion, the Three R's, taxes, armies, a division of labor
permitting a group of skilled artisans to specialize in producing works
of art for those with the resources to buy or the power to command them,
and--for all we know, although it cannot be proven--art critics. These Late
Neolithic innovations represent a technological base upon which, in the
words of Gary Snyder, "we have been, essentially, coasting ever since."
That was the second great time in the history of the world when again all
of humanity was one.

Now, the third such occasion appears to
be at hand. Perhaps this is in the nature of what the Hopi call a "Purification."
Speculations about its particular features are quite possibly no more than
that: just speculations or prophesies, nightmares or dreams. The suggestions
touched on in the present text are not necessarily any better, nor more
accurate, nor actually any more likely to come about than anyone else's
far-fetched notions, whether of impending doom or Pollyanna's paradise.
But some useful general principles may provide us with good guidance; there
are also some practical caveats--warnings, or implicit negative considerations:
that is, certain beliefs and practices likely to prove either irrelevant
or obstructive. It is easy to see that this might apply to taking sides
in any of the old dialectic processes, such as those debates concerning
matriarchy or patriarchy, about which gender is supposed to "rule,"
since any rule truly relevant to our times must be formulated from none
but the purest gold.

With appropriate wisdom and compassion--rather
than succumbing to vengeance and retribution and instead of the dominance
and repression that "iron rule" implies--we do well to cultivate
the receptivity associated with the quest for alchemical "gold."
We must consider carefully whatever clues might lead to resolving such dichotomies.
Some of them are natural and immediately obvious, deeply programmed into
the psycho-biology of most so-called higher mammals: namely, developing
patterns of cooperation that transcend the enmity of gender distinctions
by receiving our inspiration and enlightenment from the example of children.
In this process we may be further guided by the living paradigms of other
highly-evolved, cooperative species-- most especially by the cetaceans:
whales and dolphins. The greatest of historical Christian saints, Francis
of Assissi, taught that we may learn as well from the dignity of trees and
the beauty of flowers.

As the collective consciousness of humanity
hopefully evolves toward the principle of Light, for the benefit not just
of ourselves, but for the future generations of all that lives, may we come
to appreciate and respect the tranquility of clean air, clear fresh water,
and the pristine expanse of space.